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Comment by vermilingua | Hacker News Reader

As a foreigner, why is it that select states are absolutely riddled with water contamination while most are not (and some are pristine)? I imagine it comes down to local legislation, but surely nobody wants their drinking water polluted, so how did the legislation happen in the first place?

PS: especially as Colorado and Ohio are among the worst, through my lens they seem the states that are most about protecting the land.

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I don't see any pristine states. These chemicals are literally everywhere, all over the world.

Note that more dots on the map does not mean more PFAS. It means more data.

It has to be biases in reporting. How else could North Carolina be riddled with it but there be none in Virginia and South Carolina?

Also so far as military bases go it seems to be all of them.

Likely it is legislation, but probably it's required testing for certain permits or environmental reasons and then that testing gets reported.

I live in upstate NY and I've never heard of anyone testing for PFAS. In our schools they do bi-yearly drinking water tests for lead and a handful of other things, but not PFAS.

It also just might be where chemical plants or recycling centers are located. My brother used to work at a chemical recycling plant in New Jersey, there's a LOT of those kinds of plants in New Jersey. Surely the goal is 0 spills or accidental dumping but there's no way that's 100% fool proof so surely where this stuff has been created/treated/recycled there's going to be higher concentrations.

New York was actually the first state in the US to start regulating PFAS and PFOA sites in 2016.

As of last year, maximum limits for public water went into effect. I believe testing has gone on for longer than that.

EDIT: linked fixed

https://www.health.ny.gov/environmental/water/drinking/docs/...

That link doesn't work for me.

Our local school district's most recent water testing seems to have just been for lead. It resulted in a 229 page document outlining how, when, and where they tested every single tap in all the schools and what the results were. I've not seen mention of PFAS testing in our schools, which is where I'd expect to see it first.

Here's a working link: https://www.health.ny.gov/environmental/water/drinking/docs/...

Thanks! This is good news!

It seems it just started at the end of last year, and my local watery authority is already publishing results on it: https://mcwa-wordpress-media.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/upl...

Thanks. I had copied the link from google on mobile, and tried to remove all the tracking referrers but missed some.

Maybe it depends on how they expect the contamination to get in? Lead usually gets in through the local pipes, so it makes sense to test it at the taps. For contaminations that get in from the water intake at the plant it does make more sense to test them there.

My partner, who is an environmental engineer that specializes in superfund site remediation, took one look at the map and said "Colorado is only a hot spot because they're actively looking for it and other places aren't."

> As a foreigner, why is it that select states are absolutely riddled with water contamination while most are not (and some are pristine)?

Historical reasons, for one - for example, the Silicon Valley has the most Superfund sites in the US (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/09/silic...) as a legacy of the chip production that was concentrated there. For PFAS contamination specifically, part of the answer is the distribution and size of airports and military bases, where PFAS are / have been used in firefighting activities and the runoff water was not filtered.

Another reason is lax supervision, enforcement and willful ignorance on part of politics - many local politicians don't want to disturb the major employers in town for fear of driving them away and the federal government isn't much better, the Trxmp administration was notorious for de-regulating (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/climate/trump-envir...).

Depends on legislation too. Our water, in NC, is marked on the map. We’re fed from the Neuse River which is contaminated upstream. Unfortunately I don’t see that our water quality report even mentioned PFAs, at least not back in 2020: https://www.fuquay-varina.org/DocumentCenter/View/744/CCR---...

Ohio certainly doesn't have a pristine environmental record. https://ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Cuyahoga_River_Fire

When analyzing the United States you have to remember that most of it is empty. Most of the time when you see a picture like this, it's because of the population distribution. These areas look clean because people don't live there. https://www.census.gov/history/www/reference/maps/

Or alternatively, https://xkcd.com/1138/

Its also not clear how to gauge these dots. One dot may cover an enormous area or a small area. One might wonder if some instances are double counted. On the big picture level, it's reasonable down to the level of "where the people at"

Don't know why but I've always associated Ohio with poor environmental regulation. For the last decade anyway.

What’s up with Michigan, New Jersey and New Hampshire? They seem totally fouled up.

Military bases and industry. The one in Oscoda pisses me off the most, the Air Force seems to be slow playing remediation efforts that have contaminated one of the most beautiful rivers in the US.

I think it's safe to spread that distribution as if it were throughout new England and the Midwest. Those states have just reported/recorded the information more. As someone who recently purchased a home in one of those states, I was glad to actually have at least some detailed information available about nearby superfund sites and testing results.

If you turn off drinking water, the distribution looks more even. It just seems to be bias in the water testing/reporting.

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